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7th dan iaido grading due in

Friday, 9 September 2011

Arf! It's funny how sometimes it's hard to disbelieve in biorhythms and rubbish like that and how they might affect you. Tonight was an ideal opportunity to get some consolidatory practice done, there were a few people in the dojo, enough high grades to supervise and some space for me to swing me steel. I wanted to work on Ushiro for a bit for a couple of reasons, a) to see why David Mc was having problems with this one at the weekend and b) to even up the hole in the knees of my hakama.

For some reason it just wasn't feeling good. Something of this I suspect is down to the fact that my feet are quite painful at the moment. The joints of the big toes and balls of the feet are all a bit swollen making seiza and tate-hiza quite painful. Not so much that I can't sit down but I can't do it in the relative comfort I normally have. Some might say I'm getting old, to that I say "shut up and stop talking in my head - GAAAHHHHHHHHGGG!!!"

Anyway, Harry observed me for a bit and said that Ukenagashi wasn't bad. I noticed that I am getting fairly good at not swinging the sword over my should before the cut (unlike some others in the dojo - ahem!)

I went onto the standing forms to see what kind of mess I could make of those. Kesagiri isn't too bad now especially as I have discovered the secret "special way of doing it"....you want to know what it is? It's a secret....

...

...

oh, okay then. It's this. Most people, in an effort to make sure that the upper cut is at a diagonal don't rotate the sword enough. The result is a) the grip isn't strong, b) the hasuji isn't correct, c) it becomes difficult to arrest and reverse the movement at the apex of the cut. Turning the sword so that it is near enough vertically cutting downwards gets rid of all that. One will still find that the cut is inclined enough to hit all the targets and it becomes incredibly easy to reverse the cutting angle at the top.

....however chiburi while gripping the koiguchi is still bloody hard. I'm hoping that the montsuki sorts all that out as I'm convinced that some of it is down to how my uwagi fits.

Sensei worked me on Morotezuki and Sanpogiri quite a bit which was interesting but I now have to reconstruct the latter quite a bit...I hope I have time before the grading...

We all did an embu at the end, I went up on my own. I didn't feel very good, even nervous. When I had finished, Sensei said that the quality was quite low and I didn't look confident. It was true. Some days are better than others....